


Homecoming

by darrenzieger



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-08
Updated: 2018-01-19
Packaged: 2019-02-08 14:43:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12866703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darrenzieger/pseuds/darrenzieger
Summary: A former Hogwarts student of the Marauders generation returns in 2003 to replace a retiring Defense Against the Dark Arts professor. As a muggle-born who has spent much of his post-Hogwarts life among muggle artists and intellectuals, he finds himself at odds with Wizarding culture, which is conservative in its social mores and its general resistance to modernity.He also must confront his past in the form of one Myrtle Warren, the ghost he spent a quixotic year of his youth attempting to make happy, and his memories of his wife, Ariel, murdered by Voldemort in 1995.





	1. Chapter 1

I'd promised myself I wouldn't do it. Not on the first day. Not first thing.

Yet somehow my meanderings around the castle had led me to the doorway of the long-disused second-floor girls' lavatory, from which emanated familiar sobs and moans. I hadn't even seen my own office, and here I was just footsteps away from a confrontation I'd intended to put off until I was well and truly settled into my new position. Say, in a year or so.

I cursed myself for a liar and, without slowing to soak in that self-recrimination, entered the girls' bathroom.

It was in far worse condition than it had been the last time I'd visited its lone, lonely resident. No danker or darker, but in spectacular disrepair, as if a huge battle had been fought here. Perhaps that was it. The final battle in the war against Tom Riddle had been fought in and around Hogwarts. But everywhere else I'd been, all damage had been repaired, and the only visible signs that the battle had taken place were the dozens of little memorials to the fallen hung the castle's stone walls. So why hadn't they fixed up the girls' loo?

The source of the pitiful cries was not visible. "Myrtle? Myrtle, is that you?" I laughed at myself. Who else would it be? "Myrtle, please, I want to talk to you."

The dim, translucent figure of a girl in a school uniform hovered at the far end of the room, perhaps 20 feet up. I guessed she'd been up near the ceiling, perhaps behind a rafter, where I couldn't see her.

She scowled as if I'd interrupted her busy schedule of floating around and whimpering, which I suppose I had. "And who are you, then?"

Surely, she couldn't have forgotten. "You don't remember me? I... Oh, right. Of course - the beard, the hairline." I'd changed a lot since we'd last spoken. "It's David. David Fry."

She was a blur as she swooped down to get a closer look. The smile on her face - always hard-won - elated me. "David, my God, I can't believe... It's been so lo..." she scowled again. "God, you're old."

I laughed. "Well, It's been almost 25 years. You, on the other hand, look as youthful as ever. You must tell me your secret." I winked at her.

She sighed and shook her head. "Oh, now I remember. Everything was always a joke to you."

"Not everything." I stared deeply into her eyes, trying to ignore the dust motes swirling in the shaft of light so clearly visible behind them. "I took _you_ very seriously."

Myrtle searched visibly for a response to this without finding one that appealed to her. Finally, she shook her head and asked: "But what are you doing here?"

"I'm Professor Brigand's replacement. I'll be teaching Defense."

Again, that smile "So you're back for good!"

I reflected it, magnified. "Yes. We can see each other every day...i-if you want to, I mean."

She didn't reply immediately. Again, her smile faded. Her gaze fell, and she tried to look anywhere but directly at me.

"I trust Ariel is well," she said, finally.

I couldn't speak. This is what I'd truly been afraid of. This question.

"David?" Myrtle was clearly concerned. I surely looked as if I'd seen... I forced myself not to laugh bitterly at the thought.

I closed my eyes and tried not to listen as I said "Ariel's dead, Myrtle."

Myrtle was stricken - she actually faded a bit, and flickered, something I'd never seen a ghost do. For a moment I felt sorrier for her than for myself - and it was my wife who had died.

"Oh no! Oh no, David, my God, I'm so... When? How?"

"About seven years ago. Voldemort."

Myrtle ceased flickering - the spectral equivalent of hyperventilating? - and a mournful calm came over her. "So we have that in common, then."

Of course - the Chamber of Secrets. The basilisk. I'd heard about the goings on at Hogwarts in the 1990s, but I'd spent most of those years completely overwhelmed with my own life's circumstances, and little that I'd heard really sank in.

"Yes. That and me, I suppose."

Myrtle began again to flicker, this time faster. "Oh, God, David, the last thing I ever said to her was that I hated her!" She sobbed, her face buried in her hands.

"It's alright, Myrtle. Truly. I assure you she remembered you fondly. We both did."

This did nothing to staunch her tears.

"Honestly, it doesn't matter. We were all children. I would have behaved the same way in your position. It was an awful situation."

Myrtle sobbed less heavily now, but seemed reluctant to stop entirely.

I changed the subject. "Look, this is an awful setting for a reunion. I've got a faculty meeting in..." I checked my watch "...five minutes ago. But afterward, I've got a lovely little cottage in Hogsmeade, you can come by and we can talk all night if you like."

Myrtle stopped crying to emit an exasperated sigh, almost a hiss. "Are you daft? You know I can't leave the castle."

"What, still? But it's been 50 years!"

This was absurd. The crime for which Myrtle was under house arrest was haunting the wedding of Olive Hornsby, who had tormented Myrtle almost every day when they were students at Hogwarts. And it was in an effort to escape Olive's taunts that Myrtle had run into the second-floor girl's bathroom to hide - at the worst possible moment.

Less than a minute after crossing the threshold of the lavatory, she was dead, having met the gaze of the deadly basilisk Tom Riddle had loosed from the Chamber of Secrets to rid himself of the nuisance of her presence.

As acts of revenge go, disrupting a wedding seemed a pretty mild one to me. But Olive's groom was a muggle, as were half of the wedding guests. Over 40 people had had to be obliviated, and the Ministry had little tolerance for shenanigans that threatened the invisibility of the Wizarding world.

Still, how long can you punish someone for being a pain in the arse - particularly when that someone had the emotional maturity of a 14-year-old and always would?

"Look," I went on, "this is ridiculous. Back in the day, there was nothing I could do about your situation; but now I've got friends at the ministry." I grinned. "Very high up at the ministry."

Myrtle's expression was odd; she wasn't sure how to handle hope. The emotion was unfamiliar to her. Her eyes were wide, but she was seeing something other than me. She was staring through me, through the walls of the castle, to the outside world.

"How high up?"

"Do you remember Victor Stroud?"

Myrtle's expression soured. "What, that Slytherin boy you used to hang about with?" Her mouth curled in disgust as she spoke the name "Slytherin."

I sighed. "Myrtle, that Slytherin boy is one of the finest men I have ever known. And he is currently Deputy Minister of Magic."

Her eyes widened further. "Do you think he'd help me? Truly?"

"I'm sure of it. He's done far greater favors for me in the past, and this one he could do with a wave of his hand."

Myrtle shook her head. "I can't believe it. When can you talk to him?"

"Soon... in fact, sod the staff meeting, I'll pop over to the Ministry right now. I know the place well enough to apparate there. I can be back in an hour, maybe less."

Myrtle let out a laugh that was more of a startled gasp. "And you're really, really sure he'll do it?"

"Well, I-I'm not him, I can't be sure beyond any possible doubt. But I can't imagine why he wouldn't - it's been so long. There's no justification for it."

Myrtle wept, for perhaps the first time in her existence, with joy. 

I beamed at her. "I'll be back as soon as I can."

I turned to go, the turned back. "It's.. really wonderful to see you again. I haven't the words. And there's so much to say."

Myrtle sniffed, "Oh, go already. I can't wait."


	2. Chapter 2

As I approached the exit I sought, I realized that my path took me directly past the room where the faculty meeting I was skipping out on was being held. Risky.

Before I could turn to head for an alternate egress, Headmistress McGonnagal poked her head out the door, presumably checking for her tardy new staff member, probably for the dozenth time.

"Mr. Frye, how nice of you to join us. And only ten minutes late."

She had aged considerably since she had last attempted, with little success, to teach me transfiguration. But she was no less an intimidating presence for it. Her disapproval could still send my heart plummeting from my chest.

But I would not let her know that - I was her colleague now. 

"Sorry, Minerva," she rankled visibly at the use of her first name by her former student - and a terrible one at that, "I'm afraid I have pressing business elsewhere."

Her eyes flashed. I had a strong desire to hide under my desk. If we'd been across the hall in her Transfiguration classroom, I might just have done so. The hallway, sadly, was bereft of student seating. I had to tough it out.

"Mr. Frye, you've been on my staff for less than a day, and I'm already starting to doubt my hiring decision. What do you have to do that can't wait until after the faculty meeting?"

She had a point. It was just after 2 pm; I could attend the meeting and still apparate in London at 3 pm, giving me more than enough time to talk to Victor. 

No. Myrtle had waited long enough for her freedom, and I'd told her I'd be back in an hour. I knew it was irrational, but then irrationality was the bedrock upon which our relationship had always stood.

"Look, the longer we stand here chatting, the later I'll be back. So I'm going to pop off now," I walked briskly past McGonnagal toward the exit, "and I'll try to be back in time for the last few minutes of the meeting."

I hoped, foolishly, that that would be the end of it. 

"Mr. Fry, this is not acceptable. You're not the only Defense teacher in the United Kingdom, you know."

In for a penny... I turned but continued walking, backward. "Look, if you can find a replacement by the time I get back, hire him. If you can find one a  _good_ as me, I'll pay his salary. Oof!"

I ruined my cocky exit by walking backward into the door. To salvage a touch of dignity, I bowed graciously at the headmistress before turning to leave the building. As I opened the door, I felt McGonnagal's eyes boring into my back. I swear to Merlin, they left a genuine burning sensation.


	3. Chapter 3

I tried to recall how far I had to be from the Castle to be able to disapparate - where the grounds associated with it technically ended and Hogsmeade began. After I'd put a fair distance behind me, I took a stab at it and went precisely nowhere.

One of the few students braving the winter chill that afternoon - a girl, probably sixth year, wearing Ravenclaw insignia - just happened to pass by at that moment. Observing my failed attempt, she sniffed derisively and hissed "idiot."

Honestly, I wasn't much put out by the insult - I had bigger fish to fry - but there was the principle of the thing.

The wind picked up; I raised my voice at her. "Five points from Ravenclaw!" And from my own house, too. Pathetic.

The girl turned to face me, eyes wide. "You're a professor? I'm sorry, I-I had no idea. I never would have said..."

Now I _was_ vexed. " _Ten_ points from Ravenclaw." 

"What!?" The girl's obsequiousness had disappeared in a flash, replaced by outrage. I almost admired her spirit. "I said I was sorry!"

"Because you found out I was a professor. Everyone deserves respect, young lady, not just those with power over you."

That deflated her. "Sorry," she said.

"So, do you happen to know how much further I have to go to disapparate? Obviously, I've forgotten."

Her sheepish expression deepened to one of shame. "About another ten feet," she murmured.

I suppose this should have angered me further, but I felt vindicated, so I simply laughed. "Noted," I said. The girl scampered off.

I put another 20 feet behind me, just to be safe, and disappeared.

As I rematerialized in the main hall of the Ministry of Magic, a young woman in a hurry swerved to avoid me without looking up from her clipboard. 

[more to follow]

 


End file.
